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Trace as State: Reasoning Traces as Conditional States for Long-Context Transformers

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 2, 2026 · UTC

Transformers process information causally, but long-context reasoning may depend on task state discovered only later. We formalize this mismatch through conditional state update tasks. For causal state update processors, providing the condition first can require exponentially less memory in the worst case than providing it last. Motivated by this principle, we introduce Trace as State. We use collected reasoning traces as a textual proxy for task state and place it before the long-context block on a fresh pass, allowing information derived previously to guide rereading. We conduct extensive ex

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